Comment by xp84
3 hours ago
Outlandish on its face. In short, shouldn't the amount of money you expect for a fine be at least vaguely proportional to the harms caused?
Look at precedent[1]. Glyphosate and J&J talc are among the biggest awards (to be fair: they were settlements), and those allege that the defendants' products actually caused cancer -- actually killed people.
The tobacco settlement for 46 states was $206 billion. Again, for causing millions of deaths. New Mexico is 0.62% of the U.S. population, so less than $2 billion would be New Mexico's share of that.
Compare that to this 25 billion for the crime of illicitly letting political advertisers access too much of the interest data that Facebook users provided to Facebook?
The only way this penalty makes any sense is if you believe that the Cambridge Analytica scandal was the most heinous crime ever perpetrated by any company in U.S. history.
> In short, shouldn't the amount of money you expect for a fine be at least vaguely proportional to the harms caused?
No. Fines are punitive and intended for deterrence. You're thinking of reimbursements (cost recovery and damages). The latter is intended to be proportional to real world harm/costs, the former need not be.
A traffic law violation could cause no harm, but you'll still get fined for it.
Some jurisdictions even impose fines based on how deep the defendants' wallet is, calculating the amount that might serve as appropriate deterrent/punishment based on their financial situation. Fining a billionare $50,000 for literring will still not serve as a deterrent, but doing the same to a minimum wage worker would unfairly financially ruin them.
Yeah, that makes sense. On the other hand, the severity of the crime isn't what makes the penalty high in this case. The fine for the crime in this case is $5,000. Given that the penalty was reduced by nearly 90%, the penalty for the crime is something like $570. That doesn't seem outlandish to me.
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